The pelican crossings outside the House of Lords
and adjacent to No. 1 Millbank have been installed for some time
now and were provided as part of the City Council's accident remedial
programme which targets the reduction of road casualties in line
with Central Government initiatives.

The crossing outside the House of Lords was
a new facility whereas the crossing on Millbank replaced an existing
zebra crossing. The provision of staggered crossings at both locations
meets criteria set down by the then Department of Transport in
its Technical Advice Note TA 52/87. The provision of the stagger
being required on carriageways exceeding 12 metres in width.

The crossings were provided to reduce the number
of pedestrian casualties and were engineered such that traffic
capacity reductions were minimised to levels acceptable to the
then Traffic Director for London. Cost benefits analysed are calculated
on the basis of predicted accident saving costs and scheme construction
costs rather than values assigned to the time that pedestrians
and motorists have to wait before being given their respective
green signal. Predicted accident costs are provided by the DETR
in their Highways Economic Road Notes.

Regrettably pedestrians often misuse the crossing
facilities provided for them and choose to risk the crossing of
some of London's busiest roads away from the improved safety that
many crossings provide and until such time as there is legislation
against this practice the problem will persist. The design layout
of crossings and safety audit thereof encourages pedestrians to
divert to the actual crossing point itself.

The performance of both crossings is monitored
via a diary system established by the London Accident Analysis
Unit (now part of TfL) and our findings are that the crossings
have reduced the toll of accidents that existed at the time of
initial analysis.

The Council has introduced staggered crossings
elsewhere in the City and where appropriate continue to so do
although there are some initiatives under discussion to look at
ways of making such facilities more user friendly in accordance
with pedestrian desire lines.

I hope this is of some help in general terms,
if however you require statistical detail I will have to arrange
to retrieve detail from the Council archived files.